Fact of the day

Information is the most powerful weapon.

Monday

Fact N°
911

The average yawn lasts about 6 seconds.

We yawn when tired, nervous, and bored. It might be one way the body regulates temperature, a reaction to carbon dioxide buildup in the blood, a way of stabilizing the pressure on our ear drums, all of these reasons, or none of them.
Meanwhile, cultures throughout history have entertained superstitions about yawning drastic enough to include high-profile concepts such as your soul and the devil.
Nonetheless, the ultimate biological purpose of a yawn continues to elude modern science.

Tuesday

Fact N°
912

Natalie Portman is fluent in Hebrew and English and has some capacity in French, Japanese and German.

Unlike many of her colleagues, Portman finished high school, earned a degree from Harvard and has had research papers published in professional journals. As a result, she is among the few people in the world who has both appeared in a film and co-authored an academic paper. According to the small world phenomenon, this gives her an Erdos-Bacon number of 9.
Paul Erdos was a prolific Hungarian mathematician who authored numerous papers and who is used in academia in the same way as Kevin Bacon is used in film: as a way to measure the "collaborative distance" between certain persons. Added together, they make for a person's Erdos-Bacon number.
Incidentally, Portman's number isn't Hollywood's lowest; Danica McKellar (Winnie, Wonder Years) has a Erdos-Bacon number of 6.

Wednesday

Fact N°
913

The flu shot is made in hens' eggs.

The flu is an infectious disease of the respiratory system. It kills about 36,000 people in the U.S. each year, and the best defense is arguably to be vaccinated with the flu shot.
To make the vaccine, scientists culture the virus in fertilized hen's eggs, a process that kills the microorganisms.
It is impossible for it to give you the flu; instead, your immune system regards this dead, harmless strain as a threat and destroys it. Should a live strain appear at some later date in the body, the immune system already knows how to get rid of it.

It is difficult to imagine one earthquake wiping out the equivalent of the entire population of San Francisco, but the region primarily affected by the 1556 Shaanxi quake was enormous (79,000 sq. mi or 205,800 sq. km), and many of the victims lived in cliff-side caves that collapsed under landslides.
The United States Geological Survey estimates the Shaanxi at 8 on the Moment magnitude scale, the same as the infamous 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and decidedly less powerful than the Great Chilean Earthquake of 1964, at 9.5.
Nonetheless, in order to reproduce the equivalent seismic energy yield felt at Shaanxi, you'd need 1 gigaton (1 billion metric tons) of TNT.

Friday

Fact N°
915

The average Sumo wrestler weighs about 280 pounds, but in 1988, the heaviest Sumo wrestler ever recorded weighed 560 pounds.

Professional Sumo wrestlers aren't simply guys too fat to play another sport. In fact, they are among the most disciplined athletes in the world.
Their lives are controlled and monitored in ways free-wheeling Western athletes would never tolerate, from how they can wear their hair to how they can dress in public. Instead of mansions and sports cars, they live and train together in a virtual commune where things like clout and seniority take precedence.
But it's not all bad: In an effort to bulk up they skip breakfast, wash down a fixed lunch of stew and rice with beer, and sleep it all off with an afternoon nap.

Saturday

Fact N°
916

Eric Bana turned down the role of Xander Cage in XXX, which later went to Vin Diesel.

Bana was also considered for the role of James Bond that went to Daniel Craig, and Diesel himself turned down the
lead in the sequel xXx: State of the Union, a role that went to Ice Cube.
Neither of those decisions made much impact in the history of film, but back in 1971 Paramount studios clashed with Francis Ford Coppola over his desire to cast Marlon Brando in The Godfather. They offered the role to Danny Thomas, who declined and even backed the casting of Brando.

Sunday

Fact N°
917

E-books (electronic books) are the fastest-growing segment of the American publishing industry.

With the exception of mass market paperbacks, every segment of the industry -- from trade paperbacks to audiobooks to educational textbooks -- has seen an increase over the past four years, but the compound growth of electronic books eclipses them all, having gone up 65% in that time span.
The e-book publishing industry is still very young, having started in the mid-1990s. While there is no standardized
format (such as HTML), a range of e-book readers are available to the consumer, from their own PCs to specialized devices designed solely for e-books.